Recently I was packing for an Alaskan cruise with family--- son Bill, daughter-in-law Binnie Jo, and Binnie Jo's mother, Jan Maselle. As I always do nowadays, I went through my check off list. Yes, there it was. Not at the top, but close.
And that made me think of another cruise, and another year, when I didn't have, My Necessary.
***
An ominous feeling crept over me. As often happens in these senior citizen years, I might not remember my name, but I knew I'd left something at home. Whatever that something was, it was necessary for me to have it in order to survive a weeklong family cruise.
A long interval of time lay ahead of twelve Boggans who sat in the hectic Fort Lauderdale terminal waiting to board their ship, The Radiance of the Seas, for a Caribbean Cruise. About three hours, to be exact.
I began a mental check off list. Underwear. Noise machine. Electric razor. Toothbrush.
All packed.
Hormones. I'm off of them now, have been for quite a few years, so I just sweat and agitate. But, hormones made other medicines come to mind. Like the tingly, painful awakening that comes when your arm or foot has gone to sleep, I honed in, and then I remembered it.
"I forgot something I really need," I whispered to Willard. "It's necessary," I said. "I'm going to have to catch a cab and find me a drugstore."
"You can't."
"We still have a long time before we can board the ship," I reminded him.
"Don't leave your seat." My husband patted my knee firmly, almost as if to nail me in place. "I'm going to check and make sure the porter unloaded all our bags and see if we can get on the ship early. We'll talk about it when I get back."
I knew what that meant. Males can sometimes have a little bit of a superiority complex.
When I was sure my husband couldn't hear me, I announced to the others that I might have to leave the terminal. "I am in crucial need of medicine."
Questions began.
"What's wrong?"
"I may be running a fever in a day or two."
"Were you exposed to something? There's a lot of influenza going around." (This was before the corona virus took over so much of the world.)
"Possibly," I said.
"I have antibiotics," daughter-in-law Gail spoke up.
"They won't cover my problem," I said. "I'm a walking time bomb. There is no cure for what I have. Only a very special medication helps."
"For what?" one of the grandchildren asked.
"Perhaps a kidney infection," I muttered. "Pending muscle spasms. And. osteoperosis runs in the family." Each condition I named was in turn covered by one family member or another with their traveling pharmaceutical supplies. By now ten people were engaged in a lively discussion of my imploding problem and medicine in general: bodily functions, migraines, cures for irregularities, hormone replacement therapy, the benefits of chiropractic, and holistic medicine. Then someone said, "I hear walk-in clinics on a few of the islands practice aggressive medicine. They’re able to do colonic irrigation, appendectomies and tonsillectomies on an outpatient basis." That did it. We still had almost two hours before ship boarding time, and while my kinfolk went from one malady to another I slipped away.
Once outside the building I found a traffic policeman and told him I needed a drugstore. "You'll have to take a taxi, but it won't be easy to get to the stand on foot," he said, giving me directions and pointing across the way. "Be careful, there's six lanes of traffic."
He knew what he was talking about. I did it, but the man was right. At my age, darting across an ocean of speeding cars seemed to me to be totally unreal, like one of those stop action movie shots that I was not actually in, but watched on a big screen TV. Finally, safe on the other side, I caught my breath. A short distance away, to my relief, I found a long row of taxis, with For Hire signs showing.
I began tapping on windows. All I got were quick head shakes. I gave all the hand gestures I could come up with, tried a perky smile, then a helpless look, but nothing worked. Even though I heard every language, from Chinese, to Polish, and to what I can only guess was Armenian their messages came through. No one wanted to take a single female when they could charge fares for four or more people.
Just as I was about to give up and head back for the terminal, help appeared. An older couple from Fort Lauderdale, seeing my distress, beckoned me to ride with them. After snaking through miles of traffic, they dropped me off at a pharmacy where I bought my necessary. I also purchased a Dora the Explorer purple backpack and dropped my necessary and purse into it.
Going back to the terminal was no problem, the dock area was clear. Most of the passengers were already onboard the Radiance of the Seas.
Eleven were not. And I knew them all. They were waiting in an enclosed security area, under guard. There was some kind of technicality about everyone's documents being in my purse and them trying to go through security.
Later that afternoon as the Boggan clan began to gather in Willard's and my stateroom, my husband and I sat in silence. I felt like a stowaway who had brought a debilitating virus onto a cruise ship.
To clear my conscience and have one person as an ally, I whispered to daughter-in-law Gail. "I needed Nutrisse Herbal Bisacodyl."
"What did she say?" one of the grandchildren asked.
"She needed a purgative," Gail called out in a loud voice.
"What's a purgative?" the same smart aleck kid asked. "Sounds like something you put in a car's gas tank."
"Something like Castor Oil or ExLax," Gail answered. She gave me a tiny shake of her head. "All you have to do is eat lots of fruit. That's all it would take."
"Sometimes it’s not just a question of roughage," a more sympathetic family member volunteered. "It was rumored that Henry the eighth died of this problem."
By the end of a week's gorging on cruise food, I could well have shared his fate, I thought.
As the skyline of Fort Lauderdale receded, a bright yellow sun fanned into a coppery glow and slowly faded from sight. I took my purple Dora the Explorer backpack into the bathroom and put my necessary in the medicine cabinet.
***
And, this year, 2023, I carefully added to a Ziploc of medicines, My Necessary.
A bottle of Milk of Magnesia.
